This week in the saga

Tuesday a gunman kills four people in a Manhattan tower, one of them a police officer, and he writes about the city he knows and loves. Wednesday the deadline is restated in capitals and does not move. Then Friday arrives and does everything at once. At quarter to twelve he counts the Russian dead — twenty thousand this month, a hundred and twelve thousand this year — and says it is not his war, he is only here to see if he can stop it. An hour later he answers a Russian threat by ordering two nuclear submarines into position, in a post, the way another president would order a briefing. At ten past two the jobs report comes in at seventy-three thousand with a quarter of a million taken off the two months before it, and by ten past six the woman who published it has been fired by post. Ninety minutes after that the number itself is declared rigged. The count was wrong, so the counter is gone. That is the whole method of the week, and the volume will use it again.